Slipover, vest, tank?

Er whatever you want to call it, I decided that given the frosty weather and my penchant for puffed sleeve blouses that I needed one and my little bird stitch markers needed to be put to use.
This yarn – Louisa Harding Grace – is so beautifully soft, I actually used it for a hat a few weeks ago (that you’ll get to see soon enough) and loved it so much that I went back and bought several more skeins in the exact same colour. These photos are somewhat washed out, but I left them that way partly because I’m lazy and partly so that you can see the details more clearly.

The front neckline looks weird and puckered in this photo, but don’t worry that was entirely intentional. It’s going to be gathered at the bottom when I add the neckband.

The waist shaping is based – sort of – on these diagrams from a 1962 book Odham’s Encyclopedia of Knittingwhich was the very first knitting book I ever bought. I found it in a charity shop when I was 16 and I remember being struck for the first time by the huge possibilities of this craft.

There is so much information in this but it’s really not a book you can learn to knit from, everything’s arranged alphabetically and is very dense so you need some prior knowledge to have any hope of finding your way. I do think the amount of time I spent forcing myself to figure out what it meant was probably well spent in the long run though and I still use the guide to basic shapes as a reference.

This design began with the roughest of sketches on scrap paper, which is actually more planning than some of my designs have had! The little scrap of crochet is how I’m planning on finishing at least some of the edges but I think I’m going to use a pale blue. The pink was just the closest yarn in the right weight. I’m also planning on using the contrast for the inside facing of a hem rather than the sketched out ribbing. I’m about to hit that point so I’d better go see whether the yarn shop has exactly what I’m envisioning.

Pricing patterns has always been one of the hardest parts of designing and I’ve often felt like the “standard” price of knitting patterns is both lower than other similar products (eg. indie sewing patterns) and doesn’t really reflect the amount of work that goes into them. At the same time, it’s totally fair to worry that rising pattern prices will price people out.